Data from: Evaluating species richness using proteomic fingerprinting and DNA-barcoding – a case study on meiobenthic copepods from the Clarion Clipperton Fracture Zone

The Clarion Clipperton Fracture Zone (CCZ) is a vast deep-sea region
harboring a highly diverse benthic fauna, which will be affected by
potential future deep-sea mining of metal-rich polymetallic nodules.
Despite the need for conservation plans and monitoring strategies in this
context, the majority of taxonomic groups remains scientifically
undescribed. However, molecular rapid assessment methods such as
DNA-barcoding and Matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization
time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS) provide the potential to
accelerate specimen identification and biodiversity assessment
significantly in the deep-sea areas. In this study, we successfully
applied both methods to investigate the diversity of meiobenthic copepods
in the eastern CCZ, including the first application of MALDI-TOF MS for
the identification of these deep-sea organisms. Comparing several
different species delimitation tools for both datasets, we found that
biodiversity values were very similar, with Pielou’s Evenness varying
between 0.97 and 0.99 in all datasets. Still, direct comparisons of
species clusters revealed differences between all techniques and methods,
which are likely caused by the high number of rare species being
represented by only one specimen, despite our extensive dataset of more
than 2000 specimens. Hence, we regard our study as a first approach toward
setting up a reference library for mass spectrometry data of the CCZ in
combination with DNA-barcodes. We conclude that proteome fingerprinting,
as well as the more established DNA-barcoding, can be seen as a valuable
tool for rapid biodiversity assessments in the future, even when no
reference information is available.